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What Does the Canary in the Mine Shaft Sing?

6/28/2021

3 Comments

 
​Thanks to all those who posted comments and to other friends who  have written me about my blog post on the decision of the Princeton Classics department no longer to require its majors to study Greek or Latin.
These responses fall for the most part into two groups. Some shrug off the decision as a tempest in a very small teapot.  No one seemed about to follow Princeton’s lead. Nor seemed worried that the field was infected with terminal “whiteness,” or was about to capitulate to the demands of “cancel culture.”Nor did they seem demoralized by the fact that a  relatively large and well-endowed department  was having trouble maintaining  robust patterns of study in the field.  In some cases it was just the opposite, some  jubilation “We’re doing better than Princeton!”
These respondents report good things about the programs at their institutions,  often emphasizing the success of two track arrangements, one requiring the study of the ancient languages, the other not. The number of majors may not be large, they say, but their institutions also give weight to minors in the field.  The overall picture in these reports is, well, not so bad.
Whew!  If these responses sometimes sound like whistling in the dark, their reports, though no random sample, are reassuring.  Another group of respondents, however, took a broader and bleaker view, fearing, as one of them put it,  that  Classics was “the canary in the mineshaft,” gasping out a warning to other endangered fields of study. 
Mea culpa: Denis Feeney of Princeton corrected the mistake  I made in arguing that  the problem was really a humanities problem, not specifically one affecting Classics. It was more wide-ranging than I had thought. Feeney pointed out;
“  the “pure” sciences at Princeton and other Ivies were under the cosh just like the humanities: everyone always goes on about STEM, but they really only care about TE: pure science and maths don’t count, and students are avoiding them as much as they are avoiding us.”
It's not just the humanities, stupid, and it’s not just Princeton. When well-designed programs are available in fields with clear practical applications and good job prospects,, students move into them, often  in large numbers. A dean at another institution helped me gauge the magnitude  of the shift in majors, reporting that at his institution over the past thirteen years  the number of majors in computer science had gone from 100 to over 1,000.  Under such circumstances it’s hard to win the zero sum game of enrolling majors.
Denis Feeneythen  performed a virtuoso backward flip, tracing this movement back to something Dwight Eisenhower had observed in the famous speech he gave on leaving office in 1961.:
“Everyone always quotes his phrase “the military-industrial complex” from that speech, but this was only one of two main threats to freedom generated by the cold war, and the other was the threat to free and independent research (Section IV of his speech:. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp“)
 
In such a setting Classics departments because of their small size and high vulnerability are indeed the canary in the mineshaft. But just what is this canary singing?  Not, one friend reminds me, a lament for Western Civilization, which, he assures me, is “not over (yet).”
Could the song be Nil Desperqndum?,. Classics has been through rough periods before – the abandonment of its  privileged position  when colleges and universities required all  students to enroll in Latin classes, , and  again when the free-wheeling elective system, introduced at Harvard in 1885 by President Charles Eliot, spread to other institutions; or when the G.I. bill changed the scale and scope of undergraduate education. .  Faced with these and other changes the field of Classics has shown remarkable resilience (if I dare use that word after the discussion of it earlier in this blog.)   Classics adapted, and  in some respects bounced back stronger.  That required, to be sure, imagination and innovation.  An email from Jeff Henderson, the head of our profession’s Campus Advisory Service , called my attention to James Loeb’s comments in 1912 when the first Loeb volumes began appearing:
In an age … when men's minds are turning more than ever before to the practical and the material, it does not suffice to make pleas, however eloquent and convincing, for the safeguarding and further enjoyment of our greatest heritage from the past. Means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life. 
The rhetoric sounds old fashioned today, but don’t let that obscure the boldness of Loeb’s move.  We need, I am convinced, something of comparable  vigor today.
So, Nil desperandum. Let’s focus on resilience.
3 Comments
Christopher Francese
6/28/2021 10:31:21 am

Nil desperandum, indeed. Talk of decline in classics often implicitly takes as it baseline--the place the field is declining from--the mid nineteenth century, when perhaps 5% of young people attended college and they all had to take Latin, while 80% worked in farm or manual trades and had little time for reading and humanistic study of any kind. In all versions of the classics-in-crisis debate, people tend to ignore the vast progress that has been made in the diffusion and popularizing of classical texts, and the massive improvements in classical pedagogy over recent decades. Classics is in decline in the sense that Latin is no longer required for college admission. But classics is in a renaissance if you consider the vastly increased number of people who go to college now and are exposed to Homer, Vergil, Plato and other classical authors in translation, where it is taught often with sensitivity and acumen. Classics is in decline if your metric is how many times Cicero is invoked on the Senate floor, but if you consider the efflorescence of active Latin teaching methods and the joy that has brought to Latin classrooms across the country, it is in a golden age. Classics is in decline because classics is always in decline, but it is more vital than ever if you consider the prominence of classically trained intellectuals like Martha Nussbaum, Danielle Allen, Walter Scheidel, and even Anthony Fauci. In an era when Mary Beard is an international superstar, and Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is a best seller, I have a hard time buying the story that classics is on its deathbed. As Ovid would say, ego me nunc denique natum gratulo.

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Gary Pence
6/28/2021 02:21:00 pm

To the extent that come classics departments are thriving I am delighted. However, to the extent that the classics/humanities/theoretical sciences are in decline, may that decline not be due to the bleak image of the job market that is pervasive today?

When I started college in 1957, we may have been suffering a cold war that hung as a dark cloud over us. But the economy was expanding and jobs seemed to be dependably available in all sectors. I don’t think high school graduates worried at that time that they might not be able to find meaningful employment if they chose the wrong college major. I certainly didn’t worry. But today the prevailing narrative seems self-contradictory and depressing. On the one hand, we are told that a college degree is an absolute imperative. On the other hand, even a college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job. And graduate degrees are no guarantee either. We hear about PhD.’s waiting tables because there are no openings in higher education for them. In this environment students apparently believe they need to choose educational paths to guaranteed careers.

I value highly my classical education. But if I were entering college today, would I major in ancient Greek? I am guessing that I would not. If I were a high school student, would I take Latin, assuming it was even offered? I doubt it. If the economy continues to be structured as it is today, the future for classics and humanities and theoretical disciplines is not promising. And that is tragic.

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Rebecca Futo Kennedy
6/29/2021 06:16:39 am

Classics is definitely only one of numerous programs that are under threat. It isn't just the humanities--math, geoscience, physics, performing arts, anthropology, etc. I would suggest that part of the issue is disciplinarity and the way disciplinarity stagnates creative thinking in higher ed, especially around curriculum and program design.For Classics specifically, there is still a wide spread rejection of the fundamental interdisciplinarity of our field and a strong inclination towards trying to be disciplinary in a way that hyperemphasizes languages in restrictive ways that actually contribute to the devalueing of the study of antiquity as a whole across campuses, leading to the disappearance of intellectual support for what we do and offer. Disciplinary structures are 19th century. Our baseline assumptions about ourselves (as noted above) are also 19th century. Popular culture still thinks of the ancient world through 19th century lenses (thanks copyright laws?). We often refer to the period between the French Revolution and WW1 as the "long 19th century". Classics and many of the humanities especially are still in it intellectually and structurally. We should consider getting out of the 19th century and embracing creative change to what we mean by our discipline, what makes a program, and who our communities are. Because, no, things are not fine. Yes, this is part of a broader crisis in higher ed. And, no, appeals to rhetoric of "treasures" and "finer things" aren't the answer. Resilience, yes, but not in the name of maintaining the status quo.

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